Note 25 — Chapter VI · THE STUDY OF NATURE. FUNDAMENTAL POSITIONS.

C. Freedom and immortality. The effects of the Stoic principles appear unmistakeably in the above statements. They, however, pervade the whole body of the Stoical views on man.25 From one point of view, the theory of necessity, and the denial of everlasting life after death, seem quite unintelligible in a system the moral tone of which is so high; yet the connection of these theories with the Stoic ethics is very intimate. These theories commended themselves to the Stoics, as they have done in later times to Spinoza and Schleiermacher, because they corresponded with their fundamental view of morality, according to which the individual is the instrument of reason in general, and a dependent portion of the collective universe. Moreover, since the Stoics admitted a future existence, of limited, but yet indefinite, length, the same practical results followed from their belief as from the current belief in immortality. The statements of Seneca,26 that this life is a prelude to a better; that the body is a lodging-house, from which the soul will return to its own home; his joy in looking forward to the day which will rend the bonds of the body asunder, which he, in common with the early Christians, calls the birthday of eternal life;27 his description of the peace of the eternity there awaiting us, of the freedom and bliss of the heavenly life, of the light of knowledge which will there be shed on all the secrets of nature;28 his language on the future recognition and happy society of souls made perfect;29 his seeing in death a great day of judgment, when sentence will be pronounced on every one;30 his making the thought of a future life the great stimulus to moral conduct here;31 even the way in which he consoles himself for the destruction of the soul by the thought that it will live again in another form hereafter32—all contain nothing at variance with the Stoic teaching, however near they may approach to Platonic or even Christian modes of thought.33 Seneca merely expanded the teaching of his School in one particular direction, in which it approaches most closely to Platonism; and, of all the Stoics, Seneca was the most distinctly Platonic.